Selective Simulated Annealing for Large Scale Airspace Congestion Mitigation

This paper presents a methodology to minimize the airspace congestion of aircraft trajectories based on slot allocation techniques. The traffic assignment problem is modeled as a combinatorial optimization problem for which a selective simulated annealing has been developed. Based on the congestion encountered by each aircraft in the airspace, this metaheuristic selects and changes the time of departure of the most critical flights in order to target the most relevant aircraft. The main objective of this approach is to minimize the aircraft speed vector disorder. The proposed algorithm was implemented and tested on simulated trajectories generated with real flight plans on a day of traffic over French airspace with 8800 flights.